The Tale of the Disgruntled Employee – Part 13 – Conclusion

Two weeks later a server from Exibice connected to a box under n3m0’s control. Show time, I wonder if Mark can say â€˜Schema Admin’.

At Beateval

“Hello, this is Thomas how may I help you?”
“Hi, my computer just went all blue. I tried turning off the power but now it doesn’t start.”
“Did you change anything on your computer?”
“No, and my colleagues have the same problem.”
“Huh,” suddenly Thomas saw the counter for incoming calls rising drastically.

Someone shouted behind him when he looked back on his computer screen he saw that the virtual machine he had connected to the Exibice network had crashed. The host machine on the Beateval network was running fine.

At Exibice

“What is happening?” Mark roared.
“We don’t know,” Keith whispered.
“What do you mean don’t know, what have you done?”
“It was just patch Tuesday, one of the updates might have been flawed.” Ben said, his voice not much louder than Keith’s.
“Then remove the damn flaw!”
After a moments silence Keith worked up the courage to answer, “We can’t.”
Mark just stared at him, Ben jumped in.
“We can’t get into the servers, our passwords doesn’t work. Something must be wrong with the AD.”
“The local server passwords don’t work either.”
“Oh, how delightful,” Mark said sarcastically. At least I won’t have to spend a fortune on Christmas bonuses. “Didn’t you write the passwords down somewhere?”
“Yes, but we think someone might haveâ€¦ changed them.” Keith said nervously.
“Thank god it’s Friday then, now you know what to do during the weekend. Let me know when this is fixed, I don’t care what time you call.” Mark walked away.

Ben and Keith exchanged a glance, neither of them looked confident.

Mark called them both several times during the weekend, not once did they have any good news to share with him. When Monday came the network was still a mess, and nobody could work.

Two weeks later the network had been redesigned from scratch. The board of directors wasn’t impressed. Shortly thereafter Mark was sacked and a new CTO was hired along with a separate CIO.

Please note this is a purely fictional story, any names found here are made up. I’ve written this because I like writing, if someone reads it and enjoy it: great. If they get more conscious about security, that’s a bonus. If you have feedback or comments on the story please share them.